Today in St. Cloud, Minnesota, the National Organization for Marriage’s President Brian Brown told his ralliers, “This is a civil rights question. It’s about our civil rights.”

Brown speaks this line at every single tour stop on NOM’s Tour of Mostly-Empty City Plazas. Usually he invokes Dr. Martin Luther King.

In Annapolis, Bishop Harry Jackson, senior pastor at Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Maryland, told the crowd that “The major civil right, for those of us who went through the civil rights movement, is the right to vote . . . .”

Here he is:

And here is his audience:

Yesterday in St. Paul, Bishop Robert Battle, Senior Pastor of the Berean Church of God in Christ (a predominantly African-American church), told his listeners that “The African American church is firm on the biblical truth that marriage is one man and one woman.”

Here’s Bishop Battle:

And here’s another view of his audience:

Today Battle was scheduled to come to St. Cloud to be the black speaker. I’m not sure if he made it – the speakers’ chairs seem to be mostly empty and NOM’s blog makes no mention – but if so, he spoke to this crowd about the commitment of African Americans to the cause:

How old was Harry Jackson during and what role did he play in the civil rights movement that he claims to have “went through?” He didn’t get out of high school until the mid-seventies.

If I recall, he went to exclusive predominantly white schools and preferred the company of affluent white families, according to the obsequious glamour shot he got in the Washington Post last November.

This whole “right to vote” thing is a new NOM meme. Correct me if I’m wrong, but different states have different ways of voting amendments into their constitutions. Some states, like Iowa, make it harder to have their constitutions changed at the whim of the public. It seems like NOM is less intersted in voting to “protect marriageâ„¢” than changing the way states legislate based on their personal agendas.

I might wonder if some black folks might have taken issue with the analogy to what these rallies are to civil rights. Folks sure enough lashed gay folks for it, even though there is actual legitimate parallels to point to, oh like discrimination and systemic bigotry and SEGREGATION.

Chris Buttars of the LDS was a new low in doing so. But hey, whipping up hysteria is what NOM is trying to do, right?

But I thought (and forgive me if this is wrong) that the Black community was in general more homophobic, and more conservative religiously in church. I’ve heard from many black folks in internet comments or wherever how resentful they are that the gays have hijacked “their” movement (as if civil equality can be owned by any one group).

So I would think that they would not hesitate to show up to a cause they support – one-man-one-woman marriage.

And on the flip side, this is why I always take special notice whenever I see Black Queer voices raised, especially in a religious setting, because I know first hand the pain it brings to have your own “brothers and sisters” turn on you.

Radical anti-gay activist Brown wants us to believe that it’s a “civil right” to vote away rights from other Americans. It’s not, it’s unamerican, unchristian and immoral. A moral wrong can never be a civil right.

Wait a minute. I’m APPALLED that Jackson is trying to pretend that segregation and discrimination were not MAJOR aspects of the Black Civil Rights Movement! I’m offended by that – not as a gay man – but as a Black man. It’s clear this man grew up around privileged whites, b/c he’d never utter something so ridiculous as that otherwise. Don’t get me wrong, suffrage would arguably be considered the cornerstone of the Movement, but that is NOT the totality of what civil rights was – or ever has been – to Black people!

I’m sure that since it’s a civil rights matter, they’ve gone to the ACLU for help… ;-)

This whole â€œright to voteâ€ thing is a new NOM meme. Correct me if Iâ€™m wrong, but different states have different ways of voting amendments into their constitutions. Some states, like Iowa, make it harder to have their constitutions changed at the whim of the public. It seems like NOM is less interested in voting to â€œprotect marriageâ„¢â€ than changing the way states legislate based on their personal agendas.

Oh, it’s part of the process of moving of goalposts and moving down the political pyramid as the anti-marriage side loses its arguments in each state.

Phase 1: gay people are immoralists who want special privileges that will destroy The Christian Family

Phase 2: those judges are judicial activists who don’t ‘get it’ that Western Civilization is at stake

Phase 3: the state legislature and governor have been bullied, blackmailed, conned, are themselves gay, or are delusional Liberals full of atheist mind poison

Phase 4: the people of State/Country X have fallen away from The One True God and will be overrun and enslaved by brownskinned Muslims as they contracept and abort themselves into extinction.

The “let the people vote” stage is most intense at stages 3 but often begins in stage 2. But it’s also magical thinking: so far the anti-marriage side hasn’t lost a marriage referendum. (In part because Massachusetts and New York haven’t had any.)

They will lose a popular referendum in 2012 in California. But so far the lack of losses is something they can cling to as rationale for hope now that no respectable court will accept their theory anymore. Elected politicians are treating them as nuisances because they all know the trend lines show that legalization is going to have popular majorities in favor everywhere that matters in the next 10-15 years. Major churches are turning cold to them.

It gets worse: I hadn’t (and few people outside it had) realized what a problem the RCC in particular has in the form of the amount of gay men in the clergy ranks. From Italy there’s a sense lately that some sort of implosion is in the making, has become inevitable in the foreseeable future. The Vatican is in a bind: liberalizing the rules undoes in essence the re-orthodoxification that JPII and Benedict have tried to accomplish. Tightening enforcement or purges might collapse the RCC as an organization in the West (and maybe elsewhere). And doing nothing means that the average congregants continue to walk out the door at an unbearable rate.

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